OHIO RIVER TRAIL COUNCIL

In down times I do things like go for a long bike ride or run. The other thing I'm doing in that quiet time is just observing.

—Robin Williams

Bicycles are almost as good as guitars for meeting girls. 

—Bob Weir, Grateful Dead

Nothing compares to the simple pleasure of riding a bike.  

—John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35th President of the United States

Think of bicycles as rideable art that can just about save the world. 

—Grant Petersen

Bicycling unites physical harmony coupled with emotional bliss to create a sense of spiritual perfection that combines one’s body, mind and spirit into a single moving entity.  Bicycling allows a person to mesh with the sun, sky and road as if nothing else mattered in the world.  In fact, all your worries, cares and troubles vanish in the rear view mirror while you bicycle along the byways of the world: you pedal as one with the universe. 

—Frosty Wooldridge

If there’s one essential ingredient to creating trails and trail systems, it’s people. All the land and financing in the world won’t blaze a trail if there aren’t people championing the project. 

–Bay Area Ridge Trail Council, In Support of Trails: A Guide to Successful Trail Advocacy, 1993

People need immediate places to refresh, reinvent themselves. Our surroundings built and natural alike, have an immediate and a continuing effect on the way we feel and act, and on our health and intelligence. These places have an impact on our sense of self, our sense of safety, the kind of work we get done, the ways we interact with other people, even our ability to function as citizens in a democracy. In short, the places where we spend our time affect the people we are and can become. 

—Tony Hiss, The Experience of Place, 1990

Happiness, freedom, exhilaration, self-confidence, assertion, friendships, creative thinking, and physical fitness are gifts my bicycle has wrapped up and tied with a bow for me to unwrap every day! 

—Beth Geohagan

"I recognize the right and duty of this generation to develop and use the natural resources of our land; but I do not recognize the right to waste them, or to rob, by wasteful use, the generations that come after us."

—Theodore Roosevelt, 26th President of the United States

The establishment of a nationwide system of trails will be an accomplishment worthy of a place beside other major conservation programs... The fundamental objective of a nationwide system of trails is to provide simple, inexpensive recreation opportunities for all people by having an abundance of trails for walking, cycling, and horseback riding near home, as well as providing some major historic and scenic interstate trails of national significance.    

—Stewart Lee Udall, Secretary of the Interior